42 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
Richardson, the treasure registrar at
the British Museum, told me, of one
such gathering, in a pub, “He got this
reception almost like a rock star—all
these people rushed up to show him
their latest finds.” Reavill didn’t learn
much about what Davies had found—
only that it was from the Saxon era.
“I record thousands of objects a year,
and of those maybe only twenty or
thirty will be Saxon,” Reavill told me.
In more than fifteen years on the
job, he’d dealt with only one hoard of
Saxon coins.
The typical museumgoer is most
drawn to the helmets, swords, or
jewels of the Vikings and the Anglo-
Saxons; for many people, the most
compelling object in the British Mu-
seum’s early Middle Ages collection
is the Sutton Hoo helmet, an ornate,
full-face iron-and-bronze headpiece
dating from the beginning of the
seventh century. It is decorated with
a nose, eyebrows, and a mustache,
so that almost a millennium and a
half later the glowering visage of its
wearer—probably Raedwald, the King
of East Anglia—outstares any viewer.
But, for archeologists and historians,
coins, whose detailed inscriptions
allow for precise dating, and which
are signed by their manufacturer, often
provide more crucial insight about
the shifting dynamics of power in
proto-England.
The Two Emperor coins found in
Eye featured a representation of two
contemporary Anglo-Saxon kings—
Ceolwulf II, of Mercia, and Alfred,
of Wessex—sitting side by side. On
the obverse of each coin was a styl-
ized profile of either Alfred or Ceol-
wulf. King Alfred, known as Alfred
the Great, took control of Mercia in
the late ninth century—a victory re-
cently dramatized in the Netflix se-
ries “The Last Kingdom.” He there-
after commissioned the writing of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals that
remain the principal source of infor-
mation about early medieval England
between the departure of the Romans,
around 400, and the arrival of theNormans, in 1066. In the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, Ceolwulf II is briefly dis-
missed as anum unwisum cyninges
þegne—a foolish king’s servant—who
collaborated with the Viking invad-
ers. The discovery that Alfred and
Ceolwulf minted coins in the same
style offered surprising evidence of
an alliance between them—one that
Alfred had sought to whitewash in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As Wil-
liams, the British Museum curator,
explained to me, “It’s like Stalin air-
brushing Trotsky out.”
Reavill obtained the e-mail ad-
dresses of Powell and Davies from a
detectorist society, and wrote to them
on July 6th, a month or so after their
adventure. If they’d made an interest-
ing find, he reminded them, they had
a legal obligation to report it. Though
the Treasure Act requires detectorists
to contact the authorities within two
weeks, it allows for a delay should the
finder not recognize the value of an
artifact (or claim not to). Adminis-
trators are sympathetic with detec-Weeks diffuse into each other like
they’re sprayed; jetted, they shoot certain:
days, times, doodles, kept appointments,
next is lull, pool, fading, flash-disperse.I was shook and shocked by death,
chanced upon it on a winter walk,
proof of plod for miles behind me
swept in fog, a wet so thickit blended with the snow that
settled plenty on the sand. It
was not yet daybreak, and I’d driven
miles to walk and think,find peace in sweat and sea racket,
that ancient wise asthmatic sound.
The light took its lazy time for lifting.
In the shift I saw a darker shapingthan the gray—at two miles a boat
of some proportion, at quarter mile a whale.
Since then I’ve been lamenting,
moving as if held in gel.At night I dream it, see it stretched
across the wrack of high tide,
belly to the stars—flung shells and gravel—
throat-part grooved, fins unflappable,balletic flukes symmetric
in their pointing, how they fused:
all this in half-light, all this in sea dirge,
wet air matte, toned silver,and I hunched in the hood of my parka,
God-awed before shavasana,
stilled as if the glassy eye that looked to me
had fixed me in a century of tintype.Ah-gah-pay. I’ve only recently discovered
love of animals—well, Kili, Nan, and Rebus,
three dogs. Now I’ve partly taken leave
of language, have given incoherence due.I know what it’s like to be mammal
filled with deepest ocean sounds:
oblivion, solitude, stillness
intermitted by quake roar,